Art: Stalin in a Stove

In 1933 saucer-eyed Diego Rivera brought down Rockefeller wrath on his mop-haired pate by giving a place of honor in his Rockefeller Center mural to Lenin. Last week a similar rumpus flurried up when the figure of Joseph Stalin was discovered in a WPA mural at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field. Keeping Stalin company were two little-known Leftist aviators lined up alongside Byrd, Lindbergh, Earhart; a U. S. Navy hangar whose white star insignia had become the red star of the Soviets.

Artist August Henkel had a glib explanation for everything. He produced a photograph of mustached Franz Reichelt, pioneer parachutist killed in a leap from the Eiffel Tower, which had struck him as a “stunning design,” formed the basis of the Stalin-like figure. The two Leftist pilots, said he, symbolized the spirit of self-sacrifice in aeronautical advance rather than political ideology. As for the red star, some one of his many assistants had probably made a slip. Lieut. Colonel Brehon Burke Somervell, New York City’s driving WPAdministrator, promptly ordered three of the four murals taken down, cremated in a potbellied WPA stove.

Lean, mild-mannered, 59-year-old August Henkel, backed by the United American Artists, CIO affiliate, threatened to sue Colonel Somervell for defamation of character. The press looked up Artist Henkel’s background, found that in 1917 he had been convicted of burning the U.S. flag (in a peace demonstration, in which the flags of ten nations were burned together, symbolizing the unity of man) ; in 1934, of distributing Communist propaganda. Last month he had refused to sign an affidavit disavowing Communist or Nazi ties, lost his WPA job in consequence.

Administrator Somervell ordered a thorough recheck of New York City’s 1,000 WPArt workers for Communistic activities. Said soft-spoken Artist Henkel: “Somervell’s a soldier and doesn’t understand what culture means.”